Question: What exactly does a computational scientist do???

Iain Moal answered on 16 Jun 2010:

Well, there is a difference between a computer scientist and a computational scientist. Computer scientists study computers and computational scientists use computers to do science.

Computational scientists do all sorts of things. Some write programs to solve physics equations. Others use computers to search for patterns in data, such as the human genome. Others run simulations, such as to see how different molecules interact with each other in a cell, or see how planets interact with each other in space.